Google’s AI Overviews are now appearing across a significant share of UK search results pages, and they are doing exactly what they were designed to do: answering the user’s question without requiring a click. If your site ranks well for informational, comparison, or how-to queries and your traffic has softened, this is almost certainly part of the explanation.
This is a real problem, not a temporary blip. It changes what organic search traffic looks like for most SMEs, and the right response is to deal with it practically rather than wait for things to revert.
What AI Overviews Actually Do
When someone searches for something like “how long does a commercial lease break clause notice need to be” or “what is the difference between a sole trader and a limited company,” Google now often generates a synthesised answer at the top of the results page, drawn from multiple sources. The user gets a reasonable answer without visiting any of the pages that contributed to it.
This is different from the older Featured Snippet, which pulled a passage from a single page and still showed that source prominently. AI Overviews blend content from several sources, attribute them in a collapsed reference list that most users never open, and present the summary as Google’s own output. The visual emphasis is on the answer, not on the contributing sites.
For queries that are genuinely answerable in a paragraph or two — definitions, process explanations, simple comparisons — the Overview often does the job well enough that the click does not happen. For SMEs whose content strategy has leaned heavily on informational content as a traffic driver, that is a meaningful shift.
Which Query Types Are Most Affected
Not every search triggers an AI Overview, and not every Overview suppresses clicks equally. The queries most at risk are:
- Informational queries — definitions, explanations, background knowledge. “What is IR35” or “how does VAT on imports work” are exactly the kind of question an Overview handles confidently.
- How-to and process queries — step-by-step content is particularly vulnerable because it structures well as a generated list. If your blog ranks for “how to register a company in the UK,” an Overview can replicate the logical flow of your article without the reader needing to open it.
- Comparison queries — “Shopify vs WooCommerce for a small business” or “what is the difference between R&D tax credit and R&D expenditure credit” are both candidates for an Overview that synthesises a comparison or a pros-and-cons summary.
Transactional queries — where someone is ready to buy, book, or get in touch — are less consistently affected. An Overview can tell you what a conveyancer does, but it cannot book you an appointment with one. Local queries, branded queries, and queries with clear commercial intent still tend to produce results pages where your listing matters.
What This Means for Your Traffic in Practice
If you are looking at Search Console for a UK SME, you may already have noticed a pattern: impressions holding up or even rising while clicks and click-through rate decline. That is the fingerprint of AI Overviews. Your content is being read and referenced by Google’s systems, but the visit is not following.
The pages most likely to show this pattern are educational or explanatory articles — content written to attract people earlier in their decision process. That content still has value, but its value is now partly indirect: it shapes what Google’s systems say about your topic area and supports your overall authority signal, even when it does not deliver a direct click.
This matters because many SMEs built their content strategy around exactly this model: write helpful informational content, rank for it, bring in top-of-funnel traffic, convert a proportion of it. That funnel has not broken, but the top of it is leaking.
What to Do About It
Do not abandon informational content
The instinct to stop writing educational content because AI Overviews will intercept it is understandable but wrong. Google’s systems need source material, and sites that are clearly authoritative on a topic are more likely to be referenced in Overviews and to appear in the citations. There is also growing evidence that users who do click through from an Overview are further along in their thinking than cold organic visitors — they have had the basic question answered and are now looking for something more specific, or for a provider they can trust.
The goal is not to produce less content but to produce content that a generated summary cannot replace.
Shift emphasis toward depth and specificity
An Overview can synthesise a general explanation of how supply chain finance works. It cannot replicate an article written by someone who has arranged it for UK manufacturing businesses and knows which lenders are actually usable at sub-£5m turnover. Specific, experience-grounded content — the kind that requires actual knowledge rather than aggregation — is structurally harder to replace.
In practice, this means being more concrete. Rather than explaining what a service does in the abstract, explain what it looks like in practice: which decisions it affects, what goes wrong, what an SME in a specific sector should watch out for. That level of specificity does not slot neatly into a generated summary.
Optimise for Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO)
AEO — sometimes called Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) — is the practice of structuring your content so that it is usable as a source by AI systems, not just indexable by a traditional crawler. It overlaps with conventional SEO but has some distinct priorities.
The practical elements are not complicated:
- Answer the main question directly and near the top of the page, in plain language. Do not bury the point in a preamble.
- Use descriptive H2 and H3 headings that make the structure of your content explicit. An AI system parsing your page needs to understand what each section covers.
- Use structured data (schema markup) where relevant — particularly for FAQs, how-to content, product and service pages, and local business information. This gives Google cleaner signals about what your content contains.
- Make authorship and expertise visible. A named author with a clear professional background, a stated perspective, and internal links to relevant work is more credible as a source than an unattributed article. Google’s systems are assessing whether a page reflects genuine expertise.
Protect and build your commercial content
If AI Overviews are most disruptive to informational content, the logical response is to ensure your commercial content is in good shape. Service pages, case studies, pricing and comparison pages, local landing pages: these are less likely to be displaced by an Overview and more likely to drive actual revenue.
A lot of SME websites have polished blog sections and thin, generic service pages. It should probably be the other way around. Your service pages need to be substantive, specific about what you actually deliver, and built to answer the questions a near-ready buyer is asking.
Think about where else you appear
Google’s AI Overviews draw on the broader web, so your presence beyond your own site matters. Being quoted, cited, or featured in trade publications, professional directories, reputable review platforms, and local business coverage all contribute to how Google’s systems assess your authority on a topic. It also means any single channel’s decline has less overall impact on your visibility.
This is not a new idea — it is standard digital PR thinking — but AI Overviews make it more commercially relevant for businesses that previously relied almost entirely on their own organic rankings.
Where This Leaves You
AI Overviews have changed the economics of informational content in organic search. Some of the traffic that used to arrive from that content will not return, regardless of how well you optimise. The businesses that adapt well are those that focus on genuine depth and specificity, keep their commercial pages strong, build their broader online authority, and apply AEO thinking to how content is structured and attributed.
None of this is a clean fix. But the direction is clear enough: Google is increasingly acting as the answer layer, which means your job is to be the trusted provider layer — the place the user goes when the answer alone is not enough.
FAQ
Will AI Overviews affect every page on my website?
No. Overviews are most common on informational and how-to queries. Transactional queries, branded searches, and many local searches still produce conventional results pages. Your service and product pages are generally less exposed than your blog or resource content.
If my content appears as an Overview source, does that help my business?
Indirectly, yes. Being cited signals that Google’s systems consider your content authoritative, which supports your overall domain authority. But citation in an Overview does not reliably drive significant direct traffic on its own — most users do not open the reference list.
Should I add structured data (schema markup) to my existing content?
If it is not already in place, yes. FAQ schema, HowTo schema, and Article schema with clear author markup all help AI systems understand what your content contains and who produced it. A web developer or SEO specialist can implement this without significant cost on most platforms.
Is this just a Google problem, or do other AI search tools affect traffic the same way?
The immediate commercial impact is concentrated in Google because it handles the large majority of UK search volume. But AI-powered answers in tools like Bing’s Copilot integration follow similar logic. AEO and GEO best practices improve your position across all of them.